As I am sure you noticed there was an unfortunate clash of dates between Alt.net 'in the North' in Bradford and WebDD in Reading on the 18th of April. Well I see that WebDD over the weekend has published it's agenda, opened registrations and is now full.

So if you are disappointed that you can't get a place for the WebDD event have you thought of trying an Open Spaces event like Alt.net? We still have some spaces left. The key difference of this type of event, as opposed to the more traditional lecture format of WebDD, is that the attendees decide the agenda when they arrive and most sessions take the format of an open discussion of peoples real work experiences and opinions.

The first step is to build the distribution media, this is just an XCOPY process. As the MSDN documentation says you need to end up with the following directory structure on your USB drive; for this example I used G: for USB drive letter and Database1 for the name of the database I want to distribute

Using this batch file a new instance of a database can be created or an existing one updated.

Note: When I first tried to get this going I keep getting SQL file create errors which appears as TSD01268 errors in the deployment log. Eventually I realised the problem. I was running on a 64Bit Windows 7 PC. My default SQLExpress instance, running as the Network Service account, was setup to and had rights to create files in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data but not in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data. Unfortunately the VSDBCMD tried to use the second location. Once the SQL instance was set to default to the second location and suitable rights provided all worked correctly.

I have been away at the MVP summit and then on holiday for a couple of weeks. On this trip every hotel I stayed in had free internet, though often only wired. Seem many hotels have Wifi contracts with mobile phone companies and they are still charging for.

So top tip make sure you have UTP cable in your bag.

The 'most interesting' system I had was at a hotel in Whistler.

I decided not to touch it and used the free Wifi from a nearby coffee shop!

Well there are many ways to skin a cat, and also to produce a hierarchy of TFS work items. Also have a look at Artiso Workitem Manager. This product is interesting as it provides tools that work outside of Visual Studio to manage hierarchies of work items. This might be just what you need for people such as project manager who do not live in a development environment. The nicest feature for me is that allows the import and export of work items into Word document, thus allowing production of specification documents from TFS with the click of a button.